Recipes in four sentences

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Bookcase tidy up....from Billy Bland to Boxed up and Beautiful....

Some months ago, with great trepidation, I shared a photo of my office bookshelves. Well, they were called bookshelves when I bought them from IKEA. Actually they were called Billy Bookshelf and IKEA sell gazillions of the things every year. Judging by the number of times a Billy Bookshelf makeover gets pinned on Pinterest, everyone else is about as bored with theirs as I was with mine.

What started as a neat utilitarian area for files, soon turned into a dumping ground for report cards, hot off the press letters from Politicians arguing that they shouldn't have to do anything for our disabled son because no-one else had ever asked them to and thus bereft of an answer for us that made sense, 'no' seemed the best they could come up with, vaccination records for the kids, the cat and a series of dogs, Harry Potter books that didn't fit into The Diva Childs expectations of Boho décor for her room and other assorted bits of nonsense that frankly, should have gone where my now much mourned Mr Christian shoes from the early 80s went...into the charity bin.

Well I dithered about how to make this better because I'm actually a bit of a bower bird and hate to toss anything away. Blame my single parent upbringing in my sibling riddled family.

Eventually a chance viewing of the Peters of Kensington website yielded these cute and Frenchy looking box things, labelled storage boxes on the site, but notated as Hamper boxes on their delivery carton. At just $3.50 each I now have matching storage for my entire house. And don't bother looking....I bought every single one they had. Sorry!

Then The Musician Husband was despatched with tape measure and other bits of usefulness, to order many shelves from the local cabinetmaker, to make sized-to-fit spaces for my new Frenchy boxes. Don't get these from IKEA if you're thinking of embarking on a similar tidy up....they're $10-$20 there depending upon which part of the world you live in. The same shelves from the local kitchen bloke were just $3.50 each. Thankyou Mr Kitchen Bloke.

So stuff was tossed, crafty bits reorganised by project, colour, type, and stage of progression...clearly none of which was 'finished'...and other bits from around the house repurposed to mingle with my new stylish, neutral corner.

Look, it's not BHG or Vogue, alright?

But frankly it's a good old stab at an old fashioned cleanup and I'm quite proud.

Add some dreamy ostrich plumes and some dangly tassels, below, and we're done, I think.

I left the distinctly British framed pen and ink of Victoria Embankment where we disembarked from the Thames Clipper daily on our last visit to London, where it was, because it's a for-real one, not a print, and cost us a bomb. It's earned it's spot, even if it's not a bit Frenchy looking. And it's a heck of a lot more classy than one of those snow globe things with the London Eye in it.

Now which of those identical boxes has my blasted knitting in it? I haven't got around to my clever labelling with bits of balsa wood and olde worlde stamped letters yet so I'm a bit lost.

But like everything, it'll happen.

Amazing what you can do with a few fancy boxes, feathers and Frenchy Frou-Frou, isn't it?

4 comments:

Thankyou Flora dear :) I avoid decluttering like the plague as I am such a terrible sentimentalist. I still have the ticket stub from the Jackson 5 concert I attended at Festival Hall in 1974! Patting myself on the back for just being able to part from some of my 'stuff'!

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